Astral Codex Ten

Saddam

4 min read

Saddam

Article

Saddam is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 15, 2021 and January 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Saddam definitely has WMDs""; “neoconservatives who pushed for Saddam’s overthrow”; “in real life, Saddam had neither WMDs nor terrorist ties”. It most often appears alongside Iraq, China, EU.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 15, 2021
  • Last seen: January 16, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y
March 15, 2021 · Original source
The current interest in forecasting grew out of Iraq-War-era exasperation with the pundit class. Pundits were constantly saying stuff, like "Saddam definitely has WMDs, trust me, I'm an expert", then getting proven wrong, then continuing to get treated as authorities and thought leaders. Occasionally they would apologize, but they'd be back to telling us what we Had To Believe the next week.
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
The First Gulf War (1990-1991): UNSC authorised the US and 34 other countries to bomb Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invation out of Kuwait at the Gulf Monarchy’s request
The War in Iraq (2003-2011): China, Russia, France, and Germany all opposed the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of the Saddam regime that was sold as a ‘preemptive war’, turns out there were no WMD and the supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was nonexistent.
funding movements, as in the case of neoconservatives who pushed for Saddam’s overthrow, the movement was spearheaded by PNAC (created by Lockheed Martin) lobbyists who would go on to become Bush administration officials like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Weber;
Against Learning From Dramatic Events
January 16, 2024 · Original source
Even if you are on a board legally charged with “safeguarding the interests of humanity”, you can’t just speak out and try to safeguard the interests of humanity. You have to play savvy corporate politics or else you’ll lose instantly and everyone will hold you in contempt. These are the opposite lessons as the FTX scandal. I’m not denying we screwed up both times. There’s some golden mean, some virtue of practical judgment around how many red flags you need before you call out a hotshot CEO, and in what cases you should do so. You get this virtue after looking at lots of different situations and how they turned out. You definitely don’t get this virtue by updating maximally hard in response to a single case of things going wrong. If you do that, you’ll just fling yourself all the way into the opposite failure mode. And then when you fail again the opposite time, you’ll fling yourself back into the original failure mode, and yo-yo back and forth forever. The problem with the US response to 9-11 wasn’t just that we didn’t predict it. It was that, after it happened, we were so surprised that we flung ourselves to the opposite extreme and saw terrorists behind every tree and around every corner. Then we made the opposite kind of failure (believing Saddam was hatching terrorist plots, and invading Iraq). The solution is not to update much on single events, even if those events are really big deals. VI. This can’t be true, right? The bread-and-butter of modern news, politics, etc, is having a dramatic event happen, getting shocked and outraged, demanding that something be done, and then devoting a news cycle or Senate hearing to it. We can’t just throw all that out, can we? Here are a few minor, contingent counterarguments: Obviously when a dramatic event happens, even if you don’t update your predictions for the future, you still need to respond to that particular event. For example, if a major hurricane strikes New Orleans tomorrow, you may not want to update your models of hurricane risk very much, but you still need to send aid to New Orleans.